Sandy Re-Poses The 9/11 Question

When the jets hit the WTC, the NYSE shut down. Logical, given the uncertainties. But it raised the question: Why is the one activity vital to the capitalist system all concentrated in one place? Fortunately even Chuck Yaeger with months of practice couldn’t hit the relatively low NYSE building, surrounded as it is by taller buildings.

But all the same this question and improving computer technology have drastically changed “Wall Street.” Just recently the NYSE ended “open outcry” trading on the Wall Street floor. Computerized trading, executed at a bunch of server farms in New Jersey have handled the vast preponderance of stock trades for a number of years now.

Those server farms are high and dry and have their own backup power. So why did the stock exchange close down?

This is only a part of the bigger question raised on 9/11/01. Given that NYC is an expensive place to do business, many businesses would be wise to relocate. Some did, and that movement has continued under one Democrat in the Albany statehouse after another. Why do business in NYC if you can do it for less elsewhere.

Mostly, I think it is inertia and senior management being native New Yorkers. The demands of the bottom line will force them to keep asking this question as times goes on.

Now dey dealing with the aftermath...Sandy's death toll climbs; millions without power30 Oct.`12 — Millions of people from Maine to the Carolinas waited wearily for the power to come back on Tuesday, and New Yorkers found themselves all but cut off from the modern world as the U.S. death toll from Superstorm Sandy climbed to 40, many of the victims killed by falling trees.

The extent of the damage in New Jersey, where the storm roared ashore Monday night with hurricane-force winds of 80 mph, began coming into focus: homes knocked off their foundations, boardwalks wrecked and amusement pier rides cast into the sea. "We are in the midst of urban search and rescue. Our teams are moving as fast as they can," Gov. Chris Christie said. "The devastation on the Jersey Shore is some of the worst we've ever seen. The cost of the storm is incalculable at this point." As the storm steamed inland, still delivering punishing wind and rain, more than 8.2 million people across the East were without power. Airlines canceled more than 15,000 flights around the world, and it could be days before the mess is untangled and passengers can get where they're going.

The storm also disrupted the presidential campaign with just a week to go before Election Day. President Barack Obama canceled a third straight day of campaigning, scratching events scheduled for Wednesday in swing state Ohio. Republican Mitt Romney resumed his campaign, but with plans to turn a political rally in Ohio into a "storm relief event." Sandy will end up causing about $20 billion in property damage and $10 billion to $30 billion more in lost business, making it one of the costliest natural disasters on record in the U.S., according to IHS Global Insight, a forecasting firm. Lower Manhattan, which includes Wall Street, was among the hardest-hit areas after the storm sent a nearly 14-foot surge of seawater, a record, coursing over its seawalls and highways.

Water cascaded into the gaping, unfinished construction pit at the World Trade Center, and the New York Stock Exchange was closed for a second day, the first time that has happened because of weather since the Blizzard of 1888. The NYSE said it will reopen on Wednesday. A huge fire destroyed as many as 100 houses in a flooded beachfront neighborhood in Queens on Tuesday, forcing firefighters to undertake daring rescues. Three people were injured. New York University's Tisch Hospital evacuated 200 patients after its backup generator failed. About 20 babies from the neonatal intensive care unit were carried down staircases and were given battery-powered respirators.

A construction crane that collapsed in the high winds on Monday still dangled precariously 74 floors above the streets of midtown Manhattan, and hundreds of people were evacuated as a precaution. And on Staten Island, a tanker ship wound up beached on the shore. Some bridges into New York reopened, but some tunnels were closed, as were schools, Broadway theaters and the metropolitan area's three main airports, LaGuardia, Kennedy and Newark. With water standing in two major commuter tunnels and seven subway tunnels under the East River, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said it was unclear when the nation's largest transit system would be rolling again. It shut down Sunday night ahead of the storm. Joseph Lhota, chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said the damage was the worst in the 108-year history of the New York subway.

Calypso, you might if ya been around the various forum boards onna net or ya live around Okolona.
Looks like they called this one right...Sandy Could Be CatastrophicOct 29, 2012 | Hurricane Sandy bore down on the Eastern Seaboard's largest cities Monday, forcing the shutdown of mass transit, schools and financial markets, sending coastal residents fleeing, and threatening a dangerous mix of high winds, soaking rain and a surging wall of water up to 11 feet tall.

The massive storm's impact on some 50 million residents was fueling both apprehension and urgency. Sandy strengthened before dawn and stayed on a predicted path toward Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York - putting it on a collision course with two other weather systems that would create a superstorm with the potential for havoc over 800 miles from the East Coast to the Great Lakes. About 2 to 3 feet of snow were even forecast for mountainous parts of West Virginia.

The center of the storm was positioned to come ashore Monday night in New Jersey, meaning the worst of the surge could be in the northern part of that state and in New York City and on Long Island. Higher tides brought by a full moon compounded the threat to the metropolitan area of about 20 million people. "This is the worst-case scenario," said Louis Uccellini, environmental prediction chief for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Early Monday the Coast Guard was responding to a distressed vessel with 17 people aboard approximately 90 miles southeast of Hatteras N.C., Monday. Responsible for at least 66 deaths in Cuba, Haiti and the Bahamas, Sandy - with a 520-mile diameter - is one of the largest ever potential storms to hit the U.S. according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The storm was churning north Monday morning at 14 mph, still about 280 miles east of North Carolina's coast at 2 a.m. ET. It began its turn towards the north after midnight, driving towards coastal areas after battering popular tourist spots with heavy winds and rains.

The storm is expected to bring 50 to 75 mph winds, up to 10 inches of rain and potential snowfall of up to two feet over 14 states beginning late Monday afternoon or early evening, when its expected to hit land somewhere between Delaware and New York's Long Island. Craig Fugate, administrator for the federal Emergency Management Agency, said Monday the agency has stationed teams from North Carolina to Maine and in states as far inland as West Virginia. "We've been moving generators, basic supplies, we would need after the storm," he said. Fugate said he was worried about people evacuating ahead of storm surges. First there will be the coastal impact, then the wind knocking out power and then heavy rain and flash flooding, he said, adding "we don't want people to thin it's not that bad when it comes ashore."

As Hurricane Sandy cuts a path of destruction through the eastern states, many are wondering about the science behind this ‘Frankenstorm’ and whether it has any clear connection to global climate change. In a piece titled ‘Frankenstorm: Has Climate Change Created a Monster?’, NPR’s Adam Frank notes that 2012 has been a banner year for weather anomalies: droughts, fires, floods, and extreme temperatures. But while some of those events can be tied to climate change, others cannot. “There is a hierarchy of weather events which scientists feel they understand well enough for establishing climate change links,” Frank writes. “Global temperature rises and extreme heat rank high on that list, but Hurricanes rank low.” That being said, Frank write that warmer ocean temperatures do lead to more evaporation, “and that likely leads to storms with more and more dangerous rainfall of the kind we saw with Hurricane Irene last year.”

In situations like Sandy, climate scientists will often use an analogy: climate change is like putting expected extreme weather events on steroids. These scientists say that while it’s difficult to immediately attribute specific events to climate change (though not impossible, according to Frank), it is possible to say that many of these events are made worse by it. Like the slugger that’s more apt to hit a home run out of the park while doping, but can still get one into the stands while clean, scientists say the changes that humans have inflicted on the climate are making extreme weather events more frequent and more intense. “Overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is heating the planet, shrinking the Arctic ice cap, melting glaciers and raising sea levels,” Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist, has written. “It is leading to more widespread drought, more frequent heat waves and more powerful hurricanes.” “The way to think about it isn’t in terms of specific events, that this particular wildfire or this particular heat wave, was caused by climate change,” Mann told StateImpact Texas in an interview earlier this month. “But to look at what’s unfolding collectively.”

Climate change, Mann says, boils down to taking bad weather, and then increasing the odds. “Think of these individual weather events as the random rolls of a die, of a six-sided die,” Mann said. “What we are doing with climate change is we are loading those dice.” Mann noted that over the last decade, the U.S. has seen all-time heat records broken at twice the rate you would expect from chance alone. And it’s getting worse. “Over the past year, we’ve seen those records broken at ten times of the rate you would expect from chance alone,” Mann told us. “That’s like sixes coming up ten times as often as you would expect.”

yes. walt. LoL. They did. I admit i wasn't feeling it and actually, son in florida never got it and neither did we. I feel for these people. We had the derecho thingy back in June and the earthquake in may i believe it was. Not to mention we had our own little mini flood in our downstairs at the end of september. From the photos, NY looks much like NO did.

Granny says, "Dat's right - anna checks inna mail too ain't it?New Yorkers angry at lack of powerTue, Nov 13, 2012 - DIM LIGHTS, BIG CITY: Two weeks after superstorm Sandy hit some city residents are still without electricity and have described their neighborhood as ‘frightening’

New Yorkers railed against a utility company that has lagged behind others in restoring power two weeks after superstorm Sandy socked the region, criticizing its slow pace as well as a dearth of information. About 120,000 customers in New York and New Jersey remained without power on Sunday, including tens of thousands of homes and businesses that were too damaged to reconnect even if power was running in their neighborhood. More than 8 million lost power during the storm and some during a later nor’easter storm. Separately, US Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano visited with disaster-relief workers on Sunday in the borough of Staten Island’s Midland Beach neighborhood, which is still devastated two weeks after Sandy hit.

The lack of power restoration for a relative few in the densely populated region at the heart of the storm reinforced Sandy’s fractured effect on the area: tragic and vicious to some, merely a nuisance to others. Perhaps none of the utility companies have drawn criticism as widespread, nor as harsh, as the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA). Nearly 50,000 of the homes and businesses it serves were still without power on Sunday evening; 55,000 more could not safely connect even though their local grids were back online because their wiring and other equipment had been flooded and would need to be repaired or inspected before those homes could regain power, LIPA said. “We certainly understand the frustration that’s out there,” LIPA’s chief operating officer, Michael Hervey, said in a conference call late on Sunday.

However, he said that the storm had been worse than expected, no utility had as many workers in place beforehand as it would have liked and that power was coming back “rapidly compared to the damage that’s been incurred.” Customers told of calling LIPA multiple times a day for updates and getting no answer, or contradictory advice. “I was so disgusted the other night,” said Carrie Baram of Baldwin Harbor, on Long Island, who said she calls the company three times a day. “I was up till midnight, but nobody bothered to answer the telephone,” she said.

Baram, 56, said she and her husband Bob go to the mall to charge their cellphones as Bob, a sales manager, goes there to work. They trek to her parents’ house to shower. At night, they huddle under a pile of blankets and listen to the sound of fire engines, which Baram assumes are being called out because people have been accidentally starting blazes with their generators. “It’s dark,” an exasperated Baram said, “it’s frightening, and it’s freezing.”

Considering that its very difficult to repair a hard-hit area with this kind of population density, would it not make sense to move your business elsewhere instead of just passively waiting for government to fix things?

Almost anywhere else (other than SF, LA, or Honolulu) would be a less expensive place to do business.